Marketing: Aspirational Personas – Dangerous or Helpful?

Businesses leaders have aspirations, and they usually come in the form of growing revenue, implementing new product advancements and even regional, national and global market expansion. These are just a few of the many aspirational desires business leaders talk about in boardrooms. Without these, businesses may not ever grow or even take the risk.

Marketers have aspirations too. If you’re a digital enthusiast like me, these aspirations may come in the form of being able to leverage additional technology and big data for developing new, highly creative marketing campaigns. We even like to think outside the box and dream about breaking new ground with innovative ways to communicate to the world.

Aspirations, regardless of who has them, they do require a little dreaming to occur.

Dreaming Is Not Reality In Business

As someone who has spent a great deal of time studying, writing about and actually putting to use marketing personas in the real world, I understand the value they have. But lets’ talk about aspirations. Sometimes businesses and even marketing departments get caught up in developing aspirational personas. This can be a potentially damaging mis-step in guiding the business and the overall marketing strategy and the execution of it. Here’s why.

The true marketing defined persona is a representation of your ideal customer. The attributes of that persona should clearly define the types of customers that buy from your company. If your company decides that they want to go after additional personas (or aspirational ones), this strategy needs to be clearly vetted before marketing execution occurs.

What can happen sometimes is the company thinks the additional, aspirational persona is what they want, when in fact; it is not a persona that can generate enough revenue for the company to survive. Hmm, Houston, we’ve got a problem. The company and the marketing department must be realistic in defining additional personas and understand that the market may not be able to produce what you really want.

Aspirational personas can exist, but they typically take time to grow and mature.

They should not be added to the mix of already clearly defined personas just because your company wants to go after that type of person. Aspirational personas are nice to know about, do research on and move toward for future growth. Like building a house, you must draw the blueprint first and lay the foundation before it starts being built. Aspirational personas are not a silver bullet answer to a company’s financial woes nor are they the perfect solution to expanding market share. They can be helpful to add to your existing strategy once you have fully created a plan of attack both on how to understand them and their motivations but also how to market to them and service them once they become a customer.

YourBrandExposed is designed to look at digital with an eye into the future using a creative, innovative marketing perspective. We’re a consultative and tactical resource for companies looking to leverage the power of digital, web, social and content marketing strategies. Contact us if you’re feeling the digital squeeze on how to best market your company.